Last night, I received an email from a student: “In your article about programming languages, you mentioned Java, Python, R, and MATLAB but not JavaScript. Is there a problem with JavaScript? Please advise.”

Answer: “When I wrote that article, I was thinking about Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning which are two classes that I am teaching this semester. There are other programming languages that I did not mention such as JavaScript or Ruby which are excellent too.

If you want to build websites, you must learn JavaScript. It was created for web developers, especially the front end. Many mobile apps are also built with JavaScript. But more than that, JavaScript is expanding quickly to more platforms, more applications, and more companies are using it than ever before. I think Java, Python, and JavaScript are the most popular languages today. If you can master one of these three languages, you will do well.